In 1981, a United States Senate judiciary subcommittee received the following testimony from a collection of medical experts (Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, Report, 97th Congress, 1st Session, 1981)

"It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive...It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception."

Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth

Harvard University Medical School

"I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception."

Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni

Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania

"After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. [It] is no longer a matter of taste or opinion...it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception."

Dr. Jerome LeJeune

Professor of Genetics, University of Descartes

"By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception."

Professor Hymie Gordon

Mayo Clinic

"The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter – the beginning is conception."

Dr. Watson A. Bowes

University of Colorado Medical School

The official Senate report reached this conclusion:

Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being - a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.

The American Medical Association (AMA) declared as far back as 1857 (referenced in the Roe. vs. Wade opinion) that "the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being” is a matter of objective science. They deplored the “popular ignorance...that the fetus is not alive till after the period of quickening.”

Why have all the teaching texts and so many medical experts come to this same conclusion? Because there are simple ways to measure whether something is alive and whether something is human. If Faye Wattleton (President of Planned Parenthood) is correct and everyone already knows that abortion kills a human being, they have come to that knowledge in spite of the information circulated by Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion-rights community. The abortion section of the Planned Parenthood website explains abortion this way:

"Abortion is a safe and legal way for women to end pregnancy."

How's that for thorough? Maybe they just assume that the method for ending the pregnancy is so obvious (killing the human being living in the womb) that it hardly bears mentioning. More likely, Planned Parenthood is simply accommodating the general ignorance which believes abortion to be the mere removal of potential human life, rather than the actual killing of existing human life.

Biologically speaking, every abortion at every point in the pregnancy ends the life of a genetically-distinct human being.